Friday, April 22, 2011

I took some photos this morning, and after I looked at them, I could see the misplacement of my shoulder. So I thought I would post a photo of it. Also, you can't see it in the photo, but I noticed this morning that my bad arm is hanging in front of my body and out to the side, where my good arm hangs straight down and touches my body. Like an arm should.

If you look at the top photos, the shoulders are symmetrical. In the bottom photo, you can see that it is no longer so. Also, in the bottom photo, it looks like my sports bra is on crooked, but it is not. It looks that way because my right side is twisted to the front and it is pulling my spine to the right. And it looks like my right shoulder is shrugging.

You know how you do the Hokey Pokey and you put your right shoulder in and put your right shoulder out? The out position is the way the right shoulder is all the time.

Today we are starting the hCG Diet, as suggested by our doctor. If you missed my reason for making the decision to do this, you can read about that here.

If you want to see a video of what the hCG Diet is, you can look here and here for Parts 1 and 2.

This morning, Bill and I weighed on a body composition scale, took full body measurements and took full body photos. Bill has decided that he does not want his pictures posted here, but when we are finished, he says he may let me post his before and after together. I have no problem posting my before picture, although I am obviously not happy with it.

These photos are a comparison of the way I looked in 2009 when I was at my heaviest lifetime weight, how I looked a few months into Atkins, and the way I look today.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

I just saw my new PT. She disagrees with what the other PTs have told me. Big surprise. Here are some of the salient points:

1) Adhesive Capsulitis (Frozen Shoulder) is the most painful PT that there is. It is less painful to have a total knee reconstruction.

2) The PT is so painful that I will have to be doped up on narcotics for each session (three times per week) in order to be able to tolerate the pain. The less conscious I am, the better, so that means I have to be driven to and from each session. I do not tolerate these narcotics well, which means that I will spend the rest of the day in bed after each therapy session.

3) I get to have a machine at my house that I get strapped into a few times per day that will stretch my shoulder.

4) I have to do 15-20 minutes of PT on myself every two waking hours.

5) My husband needs to learn how to PT me at home for the things that I cannot do to myself.

6) My left (good) shoulder is giving out because of overuse, and is becoming very painful.

7) The therapy will take a few to several months, and every step will be very painful.

8) Although the other PTs have told me that my muscle spasms are involuntary, the new PT says that I am doing it consciously and I need to learn to control my muscle spasms with my will power. I need to learn to concentrate and will my muscles not to go into a spasm.

9) After the shoulder is released, then it will be time to make a decision on whether or not the rotator cuff needs to be surgically repaired.

10) Basically, my life, for the foreseeable future, revolves around my shoulder. Unfreezing my shoulder will be the focus of each day. It's a good thing that I am not working outside the home, because if I was, the PT said I would have to go on disability or quit my job. You cannot work and go through this rehabilitation at the same time.

Yes, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. No, I am not happy. I am feeling overwhelmed.

As you know, I have been doing Atkins now for over two years. No one has tried harder than I have to diligently follow the plan. I know there have been a few slips and off-plan meals here and there, but I have gone several months at a time without “cheating” and my weight has not budged, and has even increased for seemingly no reason. Here is my weight chart since I started:

As of today, I weigh a whopping three pounds less than I was when I started on March 15, 2009. The two times my weight has gotten below 140 pounds were short-lived, and no amount of tweaking fat, protein and carbs has proven to be successful for more than a few weeks at a time. I know that my hormonal issues are a factor, too, but no amount of adjusting them has given any relief, either.

I know that I started losing weight when Colette Heimowitz, the Atkins nutritionist, put me on 1400 calories and 11 net carbs, but the good results did not last. There have been many times in the past two years that I have gone back to that plan, and it has not brought the same results – there are even times that I gain weight eating this way. There is no rhyme or reason to it.

I have taken the advice of Gary Taubes to just stay the course, hoping that my fat stores will finally open up if I just keep eating low carb consistently. It’s been two years, and the fat is not only not decreasing, but it is increasing in defiance of the science.

I’m just really weary and don’t know that there is anything else I can do, food-wise, to finally get to a healthy body fat percentage. I only want to get to the high end of normal, which is 25%, and as of this morning, I am still 36.3%, which is too high for good health. I still have 20 pounds of fat to lose to hit that conservative goal. My waist-to-hip ratio is 0.795, which is only a few scant hundredths of a point to being dangerous and far above the recommended 0.700. My waist-to-height ratio is 0.508, when it should be closer to 0.400 for good health.

I can’t go on like this, and knowing that I am in the new book as a success story is really bothering me. Not to mention that people on the Atkins Community Forum look up to me and think I am doing well. I feel like a fraud. I visit the forum every day, but have all but stopped giving any advice.

It may sound like I am giving up and going back to a low fat, low calorie, high carb way of eating, but nothing could be further from the truth. Not only do I know too much now to ever do that, but when I have eaten that way, I didn’t lose weight doing it.

Something has to give. I spend a ridiculous amount of time on Fitday, trying to balance my food. My life revolves around my weight loss and weight gain and it has become an obsession. I want to live a normal life, but if I do not do all this work, my weight will go even higher and I will get even unhealthier, which does not make for a normal or happy life. My dad has always told me to just go ahead and be fat and happy. Right. The words "fat" and "happy" do not belong in the same sentence, at least not for me.

At the urging of my bioidentical hormone doctor, I have been researching homeopathic hCG for the past few weeks. My doctor has used the protocol herself and recently lost 35 pounds in about six weeks. I have read the main book, Pounds and Inches, written by A.T.W. Simeons, M.D. in the 1950’s, which actually has some similarities with the way Dr. Atkins and Gary Taubes look at the disregulation of fat storage. I have also looked at every website I could find on homeopathic hCG and real hCG, and I have read everything I could find on the supposed dangers of using either one of them. My doctor recommends the homeopathic version.

What I have found is that the research that has been done on hCG has been faulty, not unlike the research that was done “proving” that saturated fat is unhealthy. So at this point, all the evidence is anecdotal, whether positive or negative. There are no reliable studies.

Day before yesterday, I made the decision to do the homeopathic version of the hCG diet to try to lose this 20 pounds of abnormal fat and I have ordered my supplies from a reputable company online. The hCG will arrived yesterday, and I plan to start on tomorrow. My husband, Bill, has had the same lack of success with eating low carb, and also has 20 extra pounds of fat to lose, and he has decided to do this along with me. Because we each have only 20 pounds to lose, we are doing the short course, which lasts three weeks. People having more than 20 pounds to lose do the longer course, which lasts six weeks.

We will take the hCG drops three times per day and eat 500 calories each day for 21 days. At that time, we will increase our low carb calories to around 1200 for another two weeks, then increase to Lifetime Maintenance at that time, which will probably be around 1600 calories for me and 1800 calories for Bill. After the initial 21 days of drops, we will be back on Atkins and will stay on Atkins from then on. It is our expectation that we will each lose 20 pounds. Because men lose faster than women, Bill may have to increase his calories before the 21 days is up in order to level out at his ideal weight and not lose too much.

I have been understandably leery of the 500 calorie requirement, believing that it would cause a person to burn muscle before fat, but in my research I have found that as the body releases fat as fuel, as much as 1500 to 3000 calories of body fat per day, that the body is not really living on 500 calories, but is living on 2000 to 3500 calories per day, and muscle is not used as fuel. If a person just reduces their calories to 500 per day and does not take hCG, they will burn muscle before fat, and their body will truly go into true starvation mode and the metabolism will slow down. The hormone hCG causes the body to release the abnormal fat stores, protects lean tissue and restores the metabolism to normal rather than slowing it down. This is the theory and I guess time will tell if it proves true for Bill and me. Because we will be monitoring our body fat daily, we will know if we are losing lean tissue instead of fat.

If we do not lose the weight we expect to on the drops in the first 14 days, we will get a full refund. It is the claim that the only people who are not successful on this plan are the ones who do not follow it to the letter, eating the wrong foods, etc. and not following the other aspects of the protocol.

Tomorrow morning, we will weigh, take full body measurements, measure our body fat on our home machine and take photographs. Although we are required to weigh every day as part of the protocol, we will also monitor our body fat daily.

I want you to know that I am not entering into this lightly and without careful consideration and the advice of my physician. I have spoken to a friend about this, and she made the comment that it is unnecessary to use hCG when broccoli works just as well. Which is my point. Broccoli is not working, and how I wish it did!

I am feeling confident about my decision. I love Atkins, and I think that there are many, many people, no doubt the vast majority of people, who Atkins will work for just by following the plan as written. I would never do or say anything to discredit Atkins or the forum or the people there. As a matter of fact, I recommend Atkins to people all the time because I have confidence in it.

My advice to anyone reading this is to try Atkins and it will probably work for you. As I mentioned, I did Atkins pretty faithfully for over two years before coming to this decision, and then it was with the support of my physician. I strongly recommend that anyone doing this should try everything else first, and then only proceed with the support of your doctor. Don't try to do it alone.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Round and round and round she goes, and where she stops, nobody knows!

Opinion #1: I have a little rotator cuff tear, no frozen shoulder and only need PT.

Opinion #2: I have a serious rotator cuff tear, a frozen shoulder and a bone spur that is damaging my tendon, and I need surgery right now or I will never get any better. The surgery would be to sew up the tear and cut the adhesions of the frozen shoulder to release it.

Opinion #3: I have a moderate rotator cuff tear, a frozen shoulder and a tiny bone spur that is not doing any damage, and surgery should only be considered after the frozen shoulder has been completely healed through PT, anti-inflammatory drugs and possible cortisone shots. If that does not heal the frozen shoulder, manipulation under anesthesia would be an option, and surgery would only be a last resort. The torn rotator cuff may never need surgery, but if it does, it could be six months to a year in the future.

Dr. #3 does not understand opinions #1 and #2. He says that surgery like Dr. #2 suggested is risky and I could end up with a frozen shoulder that is even worse than the one I have now.

He said that the post-op treatment for a frozen shoulder is mobilization, and the post-op treatment for a rotator cuff tear is immoblization, so it is not smart to do both of those surgeries at the same time.

I left my new doctor's office and went straight to schedule PT and drop off my prescription at the drug store. I guess time will tell if this has been the right decision.

By the way, one thing I liked about this doctor is that he has my identical injury on his own right shoulder, and he chose not to have surgery, and healed his frozen shoulder with physical therapy. If it was good enough for him, maybe it will be good enough for me.

In the past two weeks, I have been under an extreme amount of stress due to my shoulder injury and possibly from the inflammation caused by it. So my charts look pretty bad, but I know it was not because of the way I was eating.

My final opinion of the 6WC is that I think it can work for people. It would have worked for me, I'm convinced, had it not been for the upset of the past two weeks.

Do I think that it is any better than any other low carb way of eating? No. My results on this diet were not different than doing Atkins. When things are going well in my life (low stress) and my hormones are balanced, I lose weight on Atkins, too.

Anyway, here are my final charts, and you will clearly be able to see the day that I found out that I had to have shoulder surgery. Before that, my losses were small but steady, and now I am getting bigger every day. I'm disappointed that I could not finish the 6 weeks without a glitch, but that's how it goes.

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Disclaimer: This blog is meant to be a source of informative content about nutrition and health. I am not in the medical profession and none of the information on this site is intended to be medical advice. Instead, I hope you find this blog helpful as a learning tool and a thought-provoking information source.